Just This Once, Everybody Lives
by FeathersMcStrange
Summary: Years after it was over, once the rubble had been cleared away and the dust had settled, people still talked of what a miracle it had been. None of them should have survived. The odds were too stacked, the chances too low, the danger too great. Not one of them should have made it out alive. AKA The most realistic explanation I could come up with of how our pilots coulda survived.


**So I wrote a Pacific Rim fic. It took me for-freaking-ever but I did finally get part one of four done. The other three bits should be finished in a more timely fashion. I find for some reason that I have a plethora of emotions regarding Cheung, Jin, and Hu Wei. Them and their fifty seconds of screen time. And so without further ado, I give you Just This Once, Everybody Lives.**

**Remember to leave a review and tell me what you thought! It's a new style I'm trying out.**

**- Alison**

* * *

_Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, everybody lives!_

_- 9th Doctor, 'The Doctor Dances' Doctor Who_

Years after it was over, once the rubble had been cleared away and the dust had settled, people still talked of what a miracle it had been. None of them should have survived. The odds were too stacked, the chances too low, the danger too great. Not one of them should have made it out alive. And yet, while the corpses of four massive metallic creations lay silent and destroyed, far beneath the surface of the ocean, there were eight empty graves dug by destiny, eight graves which would never hold those intended for them. This time, destiny had been cheated. The decorated places of honor on the memorial walls reserved for fallen Jäeger pilots were empty, devoid of names. People spoke of that day with awe, and they were right. It had been a miracle.

The noise is deafening. Rain pelts down harshly, producing a steady thrum, which is covered over by the screech of twisting, warping metal, the thundering ocean around them, and the colossal monster roaring and clawing at Crimson Typhoon. They hold their own well, right up until one of the metal titan's arms is ripped from it's body by the hellish creature they are fighting. In the same move, huge gashes are rent through the Comm Pod's encasing, and a cry of pain rises, loud and terrifying, cutting through the cacophony from the left of the three man formation.

Cheung Wei, oldest of the Wei triplets (not by much, but by enough to make him feel directly responsible for looking after the other two), hears the sound and, heart in his throat, whips his head around to look wildly for the source. The immortal image of Jin, born just a few minutes after Cheung, with blood saturating the front of his suit and dripping in alarming volume onto the floor is one he doesn't think he will ever be able to forget, regardless of how much he wishes to.

The panicked, thoughtless cry of his brother's name is lost in the chaos around them, and Cheung swallows back a second shout, taking a few precious moments to compose himself. Knowing full well that Typhoon is minutes (if not less) from being torn to pieces and crushed by the monster Kaiju, and that if they don't move they will go down with her, he quickly gets to work doing the one thing he had always done, faithfully and without protest – protecting his little brothers.

His harness comes off easy enough, after years of practice, both of the government sanctioned sort and the kind his own private contingency plans mandated. It takes a bit of tricky maneuvering to make his way to Jin, and a brief observation sends a flood of relief through him as he sees that the injury is not lethal – merely a long, jagged wound torn through his suit and into his shoulder. Cheung is about to help him out of his harness and abscond the fight in the name of surviving to see tomorrow when it happens.

The Kaiju, furious, with it's body roiling and murder in its eyes, rears its ugly head, opens its gigantic maw, and bites down on the Comm Pod, thrashing from side to side like a dog with a chew toy. Cheung has a split second to act, to throw his arms around Jin and find as secure a grasp on the harness as he can. He feels his brother's forehead press against his collar bone and shuts his eyes tightly, holding on, to Jin, to the hanging straps and pulleys, to the fleeting hope that they might make it out of this alive. Clouds and water flash past as Otachi shakes the head of the Jäeger, its teeth crunching in farther and farther. In the vice grip of his arms, Cheung feels Jin shake, his entire body wracked with fierce shudders. (He might be sobbing, the pain and fear overtaking him. Cheung doesn't know. Cheung doesn't want to know.)

(He _hates this_. Oh god get them _out_.)

_(Please, please get us out of here.)_

The moment Crimson Typhoon's head is ripped from her body is a moment of terror and deafening noise. Metal screeches and shrieks, sparks cascading everywhere. Stormy, gale driven ocean waves crash and roar, and the Kaiju lets out horrific cries.

Cheung Wei will remember none of that.

The only thing he will remember from the moment Typhoon is finally torn to pieces is the earsplitting, heart stopping scream as one of the razor teeth penetrates the Comm Pod, flashes past, and leaves an awful, brutal wound in the youngest triplet's chest. The scream peters out into a breathless choking cough. Wind whistles past, sky and earth and sea swirling in a whirlwind outside the gaping holes, or maybe they are the ones moving, as Otachi has thrown the Comm Pod, and then they are flying.

Cheung himself is screaming now, crushing Jin in the hopes of saving him, half out of his harness, his blood soaking them both. Blood that is nothing compared to what pours from Hu's chest, spattering across everything inside the Pod as it tumbles and spins through the air. When they smash into the water again, the jarring halt nearly tears Jin from Cheung's grip. But not even gravity is a force that can rival a brother's desperation, and his arms hold strong, just as they have since he was old enough to understand concepts like love and protecting someone at all costs.

The stillness is wrong. The noise outside rages on while inside the half destroyed Comm Pod the world is sickeningly, deathly still. Sound inside the Pod has been reduced to the seawater which drips monotonously alongside bright paintsplash blood, and harsh, raspy breaths. Hu's pain is indescribable, a white hot poker lodged in Cheung's chest, ricocheting across the link just before it is disrupted completely. And if what he feels right now, this residual echo of Drift-transfer pain, is this bad, he can't even imagine what his littlest brother must be going through right now.

So he steels himself and methodically unclenches each of his fingers from their death-tight grip on Jin and the harness strap. The tilt and shift of the broken metal dome makes completely releasing Jin a balancing act and a delicate operation, making Cheung into both a manipulator of tenuous gravity and a surgeon wielding a time bomb scalpel, knowing one wrong move could send them to both their deaths.

Ten ton responsibility is not a feeling the oldest Wei triplet is unfamiliar with, having borne that particular burden without regret or complaint for just over twenty six years. Yet this somehow feels different, because through all of the times one or the other or all of them have quite nearly bit it, they have never been thrown hundreds of feet across a bay in the middle of a storm, and Cheung has never had two horrifically injured brothers to evacuate from a ruined Jäeger as an otherworldly hellbeast tries it's level best to kill everyone in the immediate area. And still he does what he's always done. He shuts up the voice in his head telling him they are – in no uncertain terms – all going to die, and catches Jin when what's holding him up falters and releases. The two of them cling to each other for a moment, fingers digging in hard and blood the sharp color of their Jäeger's name saturating both of them.

Then they are moving, scaling and climbing as carefully as is possible given the circumstances, towards the other third of their world. The brilliant boy who is the best at basketball and has a deadly wound across his chest, the red surrounding him spreading with each beat of his strong heart. Cheung knows Hu's heart is strong because it has to be if he is to survive this, and the closer they get to him the clearer the devastation becomes.

Jin is crippled by the mind-numbingly painful injury he has sustained to his shoulder, and they are both battered and cut from the shrapnel whizzing past on their short but harrowing trip across the bay, so the going is slow, but thankfully Cherno Alpha seems to have attracted the Kaiju's attention for the moment. The ruined Comm Pod, ripped from Crimson Typhoon's body, lies forgotten, tucked against the massive black stones of the breakwater jutting into the Pacific. Cheung is briefly more grateful for the Kaidonovsky team than he has been for anything in his life, and then every ounce of focus he has is devoted to saving Hu.

There is no other option. They escape this, all three of them alive, or they go down trying. That is the way it has always been.

Much like the journey across the Pod had been, the adventure that is freeing Hu from his harness while simultaneously keeping him alive is dauntingly difficult and no small amount of frightening. Jin has tried and failed to make use of his right arm but, upon discovering it to be next to useless and any attempt to use it not worth the pain it causes, is holding pressure over the awful trauma with his other hand. Which is just as well, as he is left hand dominant, while Cheung and Hu both favor their right. This abstract, irrelevant fact pops into Cheung's train of thought while he yanks with everything he has at a jammed buckle. He angrily informs his errant mind that this is absolutely _not the time_ to be distracted by such trivialities such as whether Jin is right or left handed.

The buckle comes free and only a swift duck and Cheung's anticipatory grip prevent the half-conscious young man from performing a swift finish to what Otachi started, head-meet-hard-and-possibly-pointy-metal style. Hu whimpers, a heart wrenching sound soaked in more suffering than either of his brothers had ever heard from him in their congruous lives. Cheung knows that if he doesn't get them _out of here_ in the next couple of minutes, he will lose his mind and Hu will lose his life. Neither of those things are an option, and so he doubles his efforts at bypassing all the precautions and securities which work nicely to keep them _in_ the harnesses, but severely complicate the matter of escaping them.

When Hu's weak thrashing and incoherent mumbling becomes more pronounced and distracting, Cheung takes a few seconds to stop what he's doing and lay his hands on either side of his face, holding their foreheads together.

"You have to keep still," he says in quiet, desperate Chinese. "Please, brother, you must keep still."

Amazingly enough, Hu complies, stilling beneath the touch and soft plea. Cheung spares a moment to shoot a quick look at Jin, whose functional hand is still attempting to staunch the blood which still pours in tandem with the murky sea water. His fingers are dark red to match his shoulder, and his expression is stricken, scared. His own features must have themselves arranged in just such facial choreography, Cheung muses right as the last buckle-and-pulley comes free and Hu's full weight comes to rest squarely on him.

"I've got you," he mutters on impulse, his grip becoming less support and more embrace for the brief time it takes him to assess their best course of action. The actual conventional entrance/exit port is completely shot, as are the escape pods, not that Hu could take the less than gentle ejection, given his current state. That didn't leave many options.

"What do we do?"

Jin's question is nearly lost in the sounds of the fight still raging outside and the storm which seems intent on cramming as much of the Pacific ocean as physically possible into the remnants of the Comm Pod.

The three of them are very much equals, and Cheung has been navigating the world for a negligible amount of time more than the others, yet by a margin just wide enough to count he is still the big brother, and that counts for more than you might think. Which means that during crises of a someone-is-bleeding-out-our-Jäeger-is-destroyed-an d-we-are-slowly-sinking level of panic, Jin and Hu tend to turn to him for some sort of a plan.

"There's a very large hole in the wall just to my left," Cheung tells him without moving to point, because that would mean letting go of Hu, and – for a variety of reasons – that is the thing he wants to do the least. Jin nods to indicate that yes, he has seen the gaping entrance newly remodeled into the structure of the Pod. "We're going to carry him out of here through that. I can see a sort of cave type thing in the rocks of the jetty. We can hide there until Cherno and Striker finish the job. They'll send someone out for us."

The surety in his voice hides the uncertainty in his heart as he speaks the words. They might not send anyone. In fact, it is a distinct possibility, given that reason has probably led the PPDC to believe that all three of them are currently dead, that nobody is coming for them, now or ever. Optimism has never been Cheung's strong suit (he prefers to leave that brand of childish wishful thinking to Hu) but he clings to the hope that he is wrong – that someone _is _coming to get them. He has to. It's the only way to keep a level head.

He sees Jin nodding solemnly, and on the count of three, one and a half pairs of arms lift and pull, shifting them a few feet towards the gap they intend to escape through. Hu starts abruptly awake at the sudden movement, which disrupts the massive damage dealt to his chest, and cries out. Cheung hushes him with a few soothing words and a brush of a hand across his head. His entire face crumpled and creased in agony, Hu bites down the screams which rise in his throat every time they move an inch closer to the outside world. He focuses on his brothers, letting go of everything else, clinging tightly to the remnants of the Drift, the closeness it leaves for hours after the full connection is broken. As long as they are here, as long as they have him, things will be alright.

The journey ten feet to the first rocks of the jetty is slow and painful for all involved, and leaves them breathless and shaking. The tiny sheltered place that Cheung had spotted before is barely another fifteen feet after that, a small miracle in a moment when that is something they sorely need.

Upon reaching it, they discover it is wide enough for the three of them to fit comfortably inside with about six square feet to spare. Having retained an impressive amount of knowledge from a mandatory pilot first aid course, Jin instructs Cheung to sit on the side of the cave (which really is little more than a glorified hole in the side of the rocks) which is lower than the other, and together they settle Hu across both their laps, his head tucked in the crook of Cheung's arm and his legs haphazardly flung across Jin's crossed ones. The middle triplet had mentioned something about chest wounds and elevation and blood loss, which is more than the oldest can remember.

He thinks he was goofing off in the back of the room with Hu during that course. He doesn't think any more about it. Thinking about what he might lose for good today is not a kind of hurt he is willing to subject himself to.

Under Jin's orders, he carefully removes the battered, badly scuffed and torn plate armor from the front of Hu's uniform. The shirt is the next to go, cut free with a pocket knife tucked into a compartment in Cheung's shin guard that the unconscious triplet had designed for him. And then the full extent of the horror before them is revealed, and both Cheung and Jin have to take a few deep breaths before they proceed.

The carnage looks impossibly bad. Stretching from a few inches above his left hip to his second or third rib is the main wound. It looks deep and destructive, and just for a second, Cheung freezes.

"He needs a hospital," he says, surveying the devastation.

"We have no idea where we are, or if there's a hospital nearby."

"He needs to be in an emergency room, _now, _Jin."

"Well damn, I must have left mine in my other pants. Think for a second. Even if there was one, would it be operating? In case you hadn't noticed there are a pair, a _pair_, of category four out there. Anybody with half a mind has run like hell by now."

Cheung falls silent, one hand keeping pressure over as much of the giant laceration as he can, while the other cradles Hu as close as possible. Hypothermia is a very real threat out here, and already he can see that his little brother's slightly parted lips have taken on an unnatural blue tinge. The facts lay before Cheung, impossible to ignore. Denial is a tactic which has fallen dismally short. He is painfully aware of the fact that there is too much blood, that Hu's life is dripping away along with every drop that hits the ground.

There is one last hope. And it arrives in the form of the black, canvas jacket clad guardian angels of the costal cities. Cheung hears the woman's approach before he sees her head poke down into the make-shift cave they are hiding in. He hopes the slight shaking of the rocks is not more bad news, is not something else here to kill them (who knows, with the world in the state it's in), as they are in no condition to fight anything right now. So when the query "You boys Jäeger pilots?" is thrown to them in a friendly tone from the woman apparently crouched on the rocks over their heads, the relief which rises in Cheung's heart is hard to shove down.

(He has to shove it down. He can't afford to get his hopes up, because Hu's eyes are fluttering and his lips are blue and his skin is pale and everything else is _crimson_. If he lets himself be relieved, if he lets himself _hope_, and then Hu dies? That's something he doesn't think he would ever be able to recover from.)

"Yes," he says, and his eyes are pleading because he knows what the white patch with the red cross on her jacket means, he knows about the Doctors Without Fear. The grim parody on Doctors Without Borders, the men and women that run _towards_ the Kaiju attacks when anyone else would run away. And, bless their reckless, sense-of-self-preservation-less hearts, one of these volunteer medical professionals (who could be anything from an EMT to a physician's assistant) was here.

"Yes," Cheung repeats desperately. "You have to help me. You have to help my brother." 'He's dying' are words he cannot force himself to speak, but she understands nonetheless and climbs down to where they sit in the slight shelter of the cold, hard rock. He hopes against hope that this woman will be able to piece his baby brother back together again. Her dark eyes catalogue Hu's detrimental injuries, his head – eyes closed and lips blue – cradled by Cheung's arm, the hand whose fingers are knotted tightly with Jin's. She appraises the situation and sees that if she does not do something, it is more than one life that will be lost here.

The woman introduces herself as Dr. Tèa Levee, a trauma surgeon from a nearby hospital and volunteer with the Doctors Without Fear. Her associates (members of the DWF do possess enough survival instinct to never travel alone) have remained outside their little cave, due to the lack of room inside it, but Dr. Levee tells them that ER nurse Carmella Garcia and paramedic Donovan Glass are there anyway, after Jin jumps for the third time at hearing a sound that isn't the rain.

Dr. Levee has finished as much of an appraisal of the damage done to Hu's body as possible given their less than optimal location, and has stuck her head up out of the hole in the breakwater to request something from one of her companions. Cheung and Jin watch her warily, both of them maintaining their protective grip on their youngest brother.

"What are you doing?" Cheug asks as he hears Dr. Levee thank someone and sees her reenter, holding something in each of her hands. He doesn't want to speculate on what those items are because they look like a blow torch and a flat ended piece of metal, and whatever those items can be used for, they are not pretty thoughts. "What is that?"

"We're not in a position in which we can safely reach the hospital," Levee explains, looking from the Hu to the items she holds gingerly. "Besides. He would never make it that far. I have to cauterize the wound here or he'll bleed to death. And since we're not in a hospital, we've got to make use of what equipment we can carry in our bags. The blowtorch on it's own would kill him, so I've got to heat the metal with it and use that instead." She flicks the tool on, sending Cheung and Jin a look. "Hold him as still as you can, but close your eyes. You probably don't want to watch this."

Cheung isn't sure what's worse: the smell or the sound of Hu screaming.

Blissfully enough, the pain and the severity of his injuries have left Hu unconscious, though the initial shock of the blow torched metal was enough to jolt him awake for long enough to cry out. Now he lies still and quiet, too much energy focused on surviving for any to be left over to support awareness. At the very least however, the bleeding has stopped and it looks like Hu has got a chance at survival. White pressure dressings already hold a worrisome reddish color, showing through the top layer of gauze. It hasn't spread though, and Cheung has allowed himself the luxury of hope.

Dr. Levee has left, promising to alert PPDC somehow as soon as it is safe for them to be transported. There are other crises to attend to, other lost causes to rescue. Disaster breeds injury, and the Doctors Without Fear are needed elsewhere.

Shooting a look to his left, Cheung silently checks on Jin. His head is slumped back against the rocks. His eyes flick right, meeting Cheung's. They look at each other, and in that look there are a hundred different things.

'I'm not sorry'

'neither am I'

'we could die today' '

I know'

'I love you'

'I know'

'we did good'

'I love you'

'I know'.

They are things neither Cheung nor Jin will speak aloud, but both hear nonetheless.

The rain pounds the rocks, splashes into the ocean feet below the line where water meets jetty. The waves crash and explosions shake the ground around them. The Wei triplets huddle together just as they always have. It is only the three of them, alone, just like it has always been. Today could be the last day they live, just like it always is. And there is nothing they can do.

Except sit there.

And wait.


End file.
